


Tasseography

by coaldustcanary



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2012-08-10
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/pseuds/coaldustcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's cold and drenched and he's plying her with riddles. Must be Tuesday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tasseography

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written years ago as the first chapter to a longer work, but I got pulled away from fandom for a time and it never got finished. It works as a fluffy piece on its own, I believe, though, so I'm posting it for posterity's sake. Marking it as complete for now, but I still have the original outline, and someday I might write the rest.

“It’s fascinating, really, this weather. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that it’d pound the little plants right into the ground, or float them away under a flood down these hills, but they thrive in it! They love it!”

Rose pulled up her hood a bit tighter against the rain, ineffectual as it was, and rubbed straggles of damp hair away from her cheeks with a frown. She glanced up at the Doctor as he gestured grandly, presumably to indicate the thicket of scrubby bushes that stretched away to either side of them, and wondered if he’d notice her less-than-thrilled expression. She was skidding and floundering in the rough paths of reddish mud that cut through the greenery as they descended the rather steep hillside, leaving little attention to spare for the beauty of nature that the Doctor was so keen on. Huffing, puffing, and gingerly setting her feet with care while trying to keep her balance, Rose stopped and forced herself to look at their surroundings. Most of the leafy plants tangled at about the height of her knees, causing a veritable forest of many individual plants to seem to grow together, covering the ground like massive patches of lichen. It was hardly inspirational, but the Doctor had moved on from praising the ubiquitous plant life to addressing it directly.

“You do love it, don’t you? Drink it right up,” he beamed, bending down to peer intently at a particularly ragged-looking collection of twigs and leaves. For all the good it did in a downpour, he had even whipped out his glasses and perched them on his nose to give the plant his full attention. Rose muffled a groan and dug in her heels to try to gain better purchase on the treacherous slope and waited for the Doctor to get distracted by something more interesting. For all she knew, the plants absolutely adored being talked to like well-behaved primary school kids and it helped them grow, but she had a sneaking suspicion that he just fancied talking to plants. Jabe she had almost understood – she’d been much more woman than tree - but these plants seemed perfectly ordinary. Ordinary wasn’t bad, exactly, but it was hardly what Rose had been expecting.

He’d promised someplace good this time. Of course, he almost always promised somewhere good, but Rose had learned by now to gauge the Doctor’s promises by what he didn’t say as well. “Good” could mean many things, depending on whether or not he made eye contact with her when he said it, and if he winked or arched his eyebrows or laughed at her dubious expression or sighed theatrically in mock indignation, protesting with wide-eyed innocence. Generally, Rose had learned, the greater the reaction to her doubt, the more likely it was that “good” would in fact mean “particularly death-defying” or “a calculated risk of life and limb” versus what sensibly meant “good” to her - qualities like friendly natives and a pleasant climate. That the Doctor had only smiled, small and secretive, in response to her questions had seemed at first to Rose a good sign, if unusual. Even when he didn’t want to tell her anything in particular about their destination, he usually found innumerable ways of talking around it, though not this time. He had simply wasted little time in alternately coaxing and thumping the TARDIS to a relatively smooth halt and hastened Rose out the door into a sodding downpour on a misty hilltop, sparsely populated by a few clustered, runty trees, twisted and bent but sporting a few shiny blue-black leaves. The air was thick and humid enough to make her feel wet even before the rain permeated her clothes, and the whole area smelled bitter and earthy to her wrinkled nose.

That was all right, Rose had reasoned, zipping up her jacket. A little rain never hurt anyone. But before she could do more than take a cursory look around, the Doctor had grabbed her hand with a grin and tugged her after him. He’d simply pulled her, slipping and sliding, a fair ways down the hill, which Rose was more than ready to label a mountain by now. It wasn’t that it was so very awful, she realized. There were definitely worse things than mud and wet and boring plants and cloudy grayish-green skies overhead.

But Rose had thought – had hoped – that maybe they would visit someplace actively nice this time around, after she’d been scared so much by her mum’s phone call. Sure, it had turned out to be mostly harmless – the poor bloke was harmless, anyway, though the alien that’d eaten his friends was anything but – but it had terrified Rose at the time. And even if the Doctor wasn’t particularly concerned about Jackie’s welfare most of the time, he had been worried too. Rose could tell that much. After all, they’d been looking for him, and it might have been something much scarier than a fat alien and a few quiet bookish types that had maybe figured out as much about the Doctor as poor Clive once had. They might have had guns, Rose had realized, or some of the stolen alien technology that Harriet Jones had matter-of-factly made clear that at least the government had. It might not have been so easy to draw a sigh of relief after saying goodbye to Mum this time. There might not have been anyone to say goodbye to, and Rose knew the Doctor had to know that, and probably better than she did.

Sometimes that was the trouble. She never knew where they’d go after those times when saving the day didn’t feel so much triumphant as useless, or even after a dutiful visit home was made awkward by her mother’s accusing expression. But sometimes it did seem as though the Doctor had a sixth – or seventh, or twenty-seventh, for all she knew – sense for when worry and distraction took the place of breathless excitement for the next stop on their whirlwind tour. As a result, on occasion she got the feeling that some trips were almost a vacation of sorts, a short pause in the otherwise breakneck pace. Rose thought perhaps it was as much for his own sake as hers, though. She’d begun to realize that maybe he really did mean to make their travels less risky most of the time, but that the universe just wasn’t particularly willing to oblige him.

Well, the universe was beautiful and wonderful and glorious, but it was also something of a bitch, wasn’t it? Rose shivered a little. The temperature was warm here, but there was a breeze chilling her, soaked to the skin as she was.

Her thoughts were getting more sour by the moment, and as she slipped down to her ankle in mud, a bit of rock having given way beneath her toe, she sighed woefully.

“We’ve been walking for a while, haven’t we? And I still don’t see anything that looks remotely like anything other than mud, bushes, and more mud. Oooh, there’s a bit of wet grass over there. Not a building, or a path, or anything. You’ve gotten us here, like, a million years earlier than you meant to, haven’t you? Or later, or something equally not remotely what you intended,” Rose challenged, pulling her hands up into her utterly soaked sleeves.

And this is hardly new, she added to herself, silently. Rose realized somewhat belatedly that even even if she had made a brave effort not to sound petulant, she had failed spectacularly. Without straightening, the Doctor merely arched his eyebrows at her outburst and peered at her over the rim of his specs, now clinging precariously to their perch, spattered liberally with rain.

“Oh, that’s not true at all. If I didn’t know we were here somewhen near when I meant to arrive, I’d not have come this far. Well,” he added quickly as Rose opened her mouth to register her disbelief, “I wouldn’t have dragged us out into the rain without a good reason. Or a strong hunch we’d find something approximating a good reason. I swear! A strong hunch!” Something about her miserable expression might have caused him to continue, somewhat chastised.

“A fair inkling? A good idea? Oh, Rose, don’t be that way, honestly.” The Doctor grinned disarmingly and reached out suddenly, sloshing water from his long jacket as he grabbed her wrist and pulled her from the mud onto a bit of raised, less-mushy earth. Rose squeaked in surprise and stumbled before he hauled her up bodily against him, wrapping an arm and his jacket around her, and resting his chin on her shoulder, gaze still turned on the tangle of plants at their feet. She drew in a shaky breath and resigned herself to the wet and the mud and the chill for a while longer. Besides, she wasn’t so cold anymore, half-covered by an extra layer and the Doctor’s steady breath warming her ear – though it did make her shiver.

“Guess what they are,” he asked her, and she could hear the grin in his voice without needing to look, but couldn't resist, turning her head enough so that she could make sidelong eye contact, but not so much that her nose would be nearly touching his. He’d managed to push his specs back up somewhere along the way, but he still looked bedraggled, hair plastered down with the rain in twisted bits along his forehead, water dripping over his cheeks. He quirked an eyebrow at her, and she couldn’t help but giggle before he rolled his eyes dramatically.

“Guess!”

“All right then!” Rose lifted her head and made a great show of considering the wet landscape seriously.

“I know what they are,” she said solemnly.

“Oh?” His excitement was childlike and infectious even in the face of the pervasive wet.

“Yes,” she declared decisively, the slightest hint of a smile curling her lips. “They’re plants.”

The Doctor dropped his forehead onto her shoulder and groaned, and somehow it made Rose just a little giddy.

“Alien plants?” She continued to giggle while he growled with mock exasperation and squeezed her around the middle, grumbling under his breath before straightening and pursing his lips, almost pouting.

“Humans,” he sighed. “You’ve done miraculous things with a plant related very closely to this one, and I bet you haven’t the faintest idea what it looks like. Sad state of affairs, this is, when you can’t recognize something so important to you.”

“What’s it like, then? Give me a hint?” Now that he’d raised his head from her shoulder, she could turn her head and mock-pout right back at him. It was a game with familiar rules at this point, though she really didn’t have the foggiest idea of what kind of plant she was looking at. Maybe it was something really interesting. And maybe there was someplace warm and dry nearby to trot off to if she humored him. She drew breath to ask if the Earth-versions grew bigger at home, ready to play Twenty Questions, when she was interrupted by his sudden movement. She snapped her mouth shut and blinked in surprise when the Doctor leaned down to bump her nose with his, completely eliminating the space she’d been careful to keep, transfixing her with his intensity.

“Deep breath, now. Smell it, it should be familiar,” he ordered, drawing in a lungful without moving away, face so close to hers she had to struggle not to go cross-eyed. Rose squeezed her eyes shut – with them open, she found it hard to breathe at all, let alone really scent the air – and did as he asked. She could smell a bit of her perfume clinging to her wet clothes. She could smell the Doctor's wet jacket (marked with the faint tang of scorched TARDIS wiring) and not much else. But there was something else besides, all around them. Something spicy, but not sharp like bad cologne or incense. It was mellow and she had a feeling it had been there since they stepped outside the TARDIS and she hadn't noticed, only because it was awfully familiar.

“What is that?” Rose furrowed her brow and drew in another deep breath, still not opening her eyes. Whatever it was, it made her think of home, being back curled up in the flat on a cold day, but not any day in particular, or with anything that might hint at the source of the scent. Peculiarly, it also made her think of her room in the TARDIS, or maybe the kitchen. The kitchen, though – that seemed like something particularly relevant. Well, that made sense. A plant that people used every day, it probably got eaten. Right? She sniffed again, suspicious.

“Is it some kind of spice?” She hazarded a guess, opening one eye a crack to find that the Doctor hadn’t moved away in the slightest. He made a little non-committal humming noise, tugging his jacket tighter around them both.

“Not really, no, but it’s not a bad guess. You should be proud, it’s something that humans manage particularly well – better than anywhere else in the universe, in fact.” He paused and grinned wickedly.

“Even your mother is quite good at it, thank goodness.” Rose gaped at him for a long second then glanced down, perplexed. It couldn’t be used in cooking, then, because he’d made his opinion on her mother’s talent in that area known so many times. And then it struck her, because Mum had sort-of saved the day, in a way...

“It’s not…tea?” She was incredulous. “This is all about tea?”

“It’s very good tea,” he said defensively, straightening and pulling away, and Rose was suddenly very aware of her wet, chilled state. But in the same moment he grabbed her hand again, and set off down the slope, half helping her negotiate the mud, and half dragging her along.

“Like I said, Earth tea is the best in the universe. But they do a pretty close second, here. And really, it’s just the weather for a cuppa, isn’t it?”


End file.
